And you thought the Kennedys had it bad with a couple of assassinations and a plane crash. The latest saga by Giller Prize-winner David Adams Richards centres on a family so cursed and shoved about by fate, it’s as if they’ve come from faulty original materials, a genetic code that makes it easier to succumb to bad luck. Richards ventures back to the banks of his beloved Miramichi River, this time with the McLeary clan, whose bad fortunes are irrevocably woven together with a rival family in the town, the Drukens. While the McLearys are pathetic and drunk, the Drukens are “tough as whalebone.” They have a tendency to go off to wars “as youngsters go off to play baseball.”

Richards, who has always had a touch of the high drama in his plotting, doesn’t shy away from melodramatic prose. The melodrama that carries the McLeary family along is that of the highest degree – it almost belongs on a silent movie screen. The original McLeary, Isaac, came over from Ireland in the mid 19th-century, and when his ship foundered he hid his children in a nearby cave. Five died. Isaac’s grandson Jimmy became a drunk. The only real hope for the McLearys was Jimmy’s daughter, Janie, who at the age of six showed that she had what it takes to succeed in the world of business. When asked by the magistrate how such a young girl could have made a booby trap to attack the Druken family member guarding a local well, Janie replied, “With much patience.”

Janie is a full, brimming character, and Richards spends time with each of her eccentricities. Her grandson, the narrator, has decided to comb over the family’s history in an attempt to find when the McLeary curse began, and in doing so the stories of Janie’s youth emerge like lost legends. Janie goes through life friendless, bold, a little strange. She marries a Protestant Englishman who has already failed once in love and business in England. He’s a man too ill to take advantage of his new setting. (“I’m Janie McLeary,” she says upon introduction. “I’m just about done for,” is George King’s reply.)

Before kicking off, George opens a movie house and Janie fights to hold onto it after his death. Her tenacity is the only thing keeping at bay the black-hearted businessman and rival film house owner Joey Elias, who has fallen in with the Drukens and is set on driving Janie out of business by any means.

The novel’s first half tumbles past with frenetic action – a novel centred on a movie theatre mirrors the world of silent film. As the story progresses up through the 20th century, the adventures become more personal. It’s as if the betrayals, murders, and feats of daring of the silent movies have given way to smaller domestic woes. Tom Mix changes into Kramer vs. Kramer. (There’s another resonance with the film world. Most of the characters’ names sound as if they’ve just stepped off a porn set – Roy Dingle, Ginger King, Gus Busters.)

But for how many generations can one family spiral downward? Richards has a lot of time to cover, many years and events to construct, so occasionally mothers die and sisters divorce on the same page. A sprawling novel allows Richards to usher a few McLearys and Drukens from their birth all the way to their death, and to his credit his prose includes a touching farewell for each of these lives. The problem is that the McLearys who carry on after Janie’s death feel like sketches in the wake of such a full-blown character.

In the parlance of self-improvement, Janie is a doer. When the bank is threatening to take her movie house away and Elias’s men are keeping watch over her house, Janie cracks a rib sneaking out the window. She swims a cold river in the dark, and in a strange turn of events, ends up winning the theatre back with the help of Lord Beaverbrook. The latter part of the book – the implosion of the family in the 1970s and ’80s – is populated by a more downbeaten array of family members, including the narrator, Wendell, and his alcoholic father, Miles, who sink into gin, gardening, and despair.

As time wears on, the relationship between Wendell and his father grows closer, though it’s probably because the two have no one else to drink with. The McLearys have made many mistakes over the years in love and life and thankfully they’re able to correct a few near the end of the tale. Unfortunately, these latter adventures pale in comparison with Janie’s. Richards’ writing remains inventive throughout, but he just can’t seem to bring to life the rest of the McLearys. In a novel about a family of losers, it’s the one winner who stands out.